“I would deny him your advocacy,” Lucius responded. “You have heard from Induciomarus’s own lips the evidence against him. Is all that to be canceled out, simply because Fonteius is a friend of Pompey?”

“It has nothing to do with Pompey.”

“Then why do it?”

“Politics,” said Cicero, suddenly sitting up, swinging himself around, and planting his feet on the floor. He fixed his gaze on Lucius and said very seriously, “The most fatal error for any statesman is to allow his fellow countrymen, even for an instant, to suspect that he puts the interests of foreigners above those of his own people. That is the lie which my enemies spread about me after I represented the Sicilians in the Verres case, and that is the calumny which I can lay to rest if I defend Fonteius now.”

“And the Gauls?”

“The Gauls will be represented perfectly adequately by Plaetorius.”

“Not as well as they would be by you.”

“But you say yourself that Fonteius has a weak case. Let the weakest case be defended by the strongest advocate. What could be fairer than that?”

Cicero flashed him his most charming smile, but for once Lucius refused to be parted from his anger. Knowing, I suspect, that the only sure way to defeat Cicero in argument was to withdraw from the conversation altogether, he stood and limped across to the atrium. I had not realized until that moment how ill he looked, how thin and stooped; he had never really recovered from the strain of his efforts in Sicily. “Words, words, words,” he said bitterly. “Is there no end to the tricks you can make them perform? But, as with all men, your great strength is also your weakness, Marcus, and I am sorry for you, absolutely I am, because soon you will not be able to tell your tricks from the truth. And then you will be lost.”

Cicero laughed. “‘The truth.’ Now there is a loose term for a philosopher to use!” But he was addressing his witticism to the air, for Lucius had gone.

“He will be back,” said Quintus.

But he did not come back, and over the following days Cicero went about his preparations for the trial with the determined expression of a man who has resigned himself to some distasteful but necessary surgical procedure. As for his client: Fonteius had been anticipating his prosecution for three years, and had used the time well, to acquire a mass of evidence to support his defense. He had witnesses from Spain and Gaul, including officers from Pompey’s camp, and various sly and greedy tax farmers and merchants-members of the Roman community in Gaul, who would have sworn that night was day and land sea if it would have turned them a reasonable profit. The only trouble, as Cicero realized once he had mastered his brief, was that Fonteius was plainly guilty. He sat for a long time staring at the wall in his study, while I tiptoed around him, and it is important that I convey what he was doing, for it is necessary in order to understand his character. He was not merely trying, as a cynical and second-rate advocate might have done, to devise some clever tactic in order to outwit the prosecution. He was trying to find something to believe in. That was the core of his genius, both as an advocate and as a statesman. “What convinces is conviction,” he used to say. “You simply must believe the argument you are advancing, otherwise you are lost. No chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win the case, if your audience senses that belief is missing.” Just one thing to believe in, that was all he needed, and then he could latch on to it, build out from it, embellish it, and transform it just for the space of an hour or two into the most important issue in the world-and deliver it with a passion that would obliterate the flimsy rationality of his opponents. Afterwards he would usually forget it entirely. And what did he believe in when it came to Marcus Fonteius? He gazed at the wall for many hours and concluded only this: that his client was a Roman, being assailed within his own city by Rome ’s traditional enemy, the Gauls, and that whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, that was a kind of treachery.

Such was the line which Cicero took when he found himself once again in the familiar surroundings of the extortion court before the Temple of Castor. The trial lasted from the end of October until the middle of November, and was most keenly fought, witness by witness, right up until the final day, when Cicero delivered the closing speech for the defense. From my place behind the senator, I had, from the opening day, kept an eye out for Lucius among the crowd of spectators, but it was only on that last morning that I fancied I saw him, a pale shadow, propped against a pillar at the very back of the audience. If it was him-and I do not know for sure that it was-I have often wondered what he thought of his cousin’s oratory as he tore into the evidence of the Gauls, jabbing his finger at Induciomarus-“Does he actually know what is meant by giving evidence? Is the greatest chief of the Gauls worthy to be set on the same level as even the meanest citizen of Rome?”-and demanding to know how a Roman jury could possibly believe the word of a man whose gods demanded human victims: “For who does not know that to this very day they retain the monstrous and barbarous custom of sacrificing men?” What would he have said to Cicero ’s description of the Gaulish witnesses, “swaggering from end to end of the Forum, with proud and unflinching expressions on their faces and barbarian menaces upon their lips”? And what would he have made of Cicero’s brilliant coup de théâtre at the very end, of producing in court, in the closing moments of his speech, Fonteius’s sister, a vestal virgin, clad from head to toe in her official garb of a flowing white gown, with a white linen shawl around her narrow shoulders, who raised her white veil to show the jury her tears-a sight which made her brother also break down weeping? Cicero laid his hand gently on his client’s shoulders.

“From this peril, gentlemen, defend a gallant and a blameless citizen. Let the world see that you place more confidence in the evidence of our fellow countrymen than in that of foreigners, that you have greater regard for the welfare of our citizens than for the caprice of our foes, that you set more store by the entreaties of she who presides over your sacrifices than by the effrontery of those who have waged war against the sacrifices and shrines of all the world. Finally, gentlemen, see to it-and here the dignity of the Roman people is most vitally engaged-see to it that you show that the prayers of a vestal maid have more weight with you than do the threats of Gauls.”

Well, that speech certainly did the trick, both for Fonteius, who was acquitted, and for Cicero, who was never again regarded as anything less than the most fervent patriot in Rome. I looked up after I had finished making my shorthand record, but it was impossible to discern individuals in the crowd anymore-it had become a single, seething creature, aroused by Cicero ’s technique to a chanting ecstasy of national self-glorification. Anyway, I sincerely hope that Lucius was not present, and there must surely be a chance that he was not, for it was only a few hours later that he was discovered at his home quite dead.

CICERO WAS DINING PRIVATELY with Terentia when the message came. The bearer was one of Lucius’s slaves. Scarcely more than a boy, he was weeping uncontrollably, so it fell to me to take the news in to the senator. He looked up blankly from his meal when I told him, stared straight at me, and said irritably, “No,” as if I had offered him the wrong set of documents in court. And for a long time that was all he said: “No, no.” He did not move; he did not even blink. The working of his brain seemed locked. It was Terentia who eventually spoke, suggesting gently that he should go and find out what had happened, whereupon he started searching dumbly for his shoes. “Keep an eye on him, Tiro,” she said quietly to me.

Grief kills time. All that I retain of that night, and of the days which followed, are fragments of scenes, like some luridly brilliant hallucinations left behind after a fever. I recall how thin and wasted Lucius’s body was when we found it, lying on its right side in his cot, the knees drawn up, the left hand laid flat across his eyes, and how Cicero, in the traditional manner, bent over him with a candle, to call him back to life. “What was he seeing?” That was what he kept asking: “What was he seeing?” Cicero was not, as I have indicated, a superstitious man, but he could not rid himself of the conviction that Lucius had been presented with a vision of unparalleled horror at the end, and that this had somehow frightened him to death. As to how he died-well, here I must confess to carrying a secret all these years, of which I shall be glad now to unburden myself. There was a pestle and mortar in the corner of that little room, with what Cicero -and I, too, at first-took to be a bunch of fennel lying beside it. It was a reasonable supposition, for among Lucius’s many chronic ailments was poor digestion, which he attempted to relieve by a solution of fennel oil. Only later, when I was clearing the room, did I rub those lacy leaves with my thumb and detect the frightful, musty, dead-mouse odor of hemlock. I knew then that Lucius had tired of this life, and for whatever reason-despair at its injustices, weariness with his ailments-had chosen to die like his hero, Socrates. This information I always meant to share with Cicero and Quintus. But for some reason, in the sadness of those days, I kept it to myself, and then the proper time for disclosure had passed, and it seemed better to let them continue to believe he had died involuntarily.

I also recall how Cicero spent such a great sum on flowers and incense that after Lucius had been cleaned and anointed and laid on his funeral couch in his finest toga, his skinny feet pointing toward the door, he seemed, even in that drab November, to be in an Elysian grove of petals and fragrant scent. I remember the surprising number, for such a solitary man, of friends and neighbors who came to pay their respects, and the funeral procession at dusk out to the Esquiline Field, with young Frugi weeping so hard he could not catch his breath. I recall the dirges and the music, and the respectful glances of the citizens along the route-for this was a Cicero they were bearing to meet his ancestors, and the name now counted for something in Rome. Out on the frozen field, the body lay on its pyre under the stars, and the great orator struggled to deliver a brief eulogy. But his words would not perform their tricks for him on that occasion, and he had to give up. He could not even collect himself sufficiently to apply the torch to ignite the wood, and passed the task instead to Quintus. As the flames shot high, the mourners threw their gifts of scent and spices onto the bonfire, and the perfumed smoke, flecked with orange sparks, curled up to the Milky Way. That night I sat with the senator in his study as he dictated a letter to Atticus, and it is surely a tribute to the affection which Lucius also inspired in that noble heart that this was the first of Cicero ’s hundreds of letters which Atticus chose to preserve: